


Sick Day

by onward_came_the_meteors



Series: October 2020 Prompts [29]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: (Oh My Gosh They Were Roommates), Fluff, Friendship, Gen, Humor, James "Rhodey" Rhodes & Tony Stark at MIT, MIT Era, One Shot, POV Third Person, Sickfic, and they were ROOMMATES
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-29
Updated: 2020-10-29
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:14:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,648
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27264073
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/onward_came_the_meteors/pseuds/onward_came_the_meteors
Summary: Tony and Rhodey share more than just a dorm room.
Relationships: James "Rhodey" Rhodes & Tony Stark
Series: October 2020 Prompts [29]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1947679
Comments: 4
Kudos: 25





	Sick Day

**Author's Note:**

> Day 29, for the prompt "reluctant bedrest"

Tony marched into the dorm room and crossed his arms. "This is _ your _ fault." 

His announcement probably would've sounded more accusatory had his voice not been so scratchy it sounded like chunks of gravel, but too late now. 

Rhodey didn’t even look up from his homework—a couple yawned-open textbooks and assorted papers that were all stacked around him and how could he  _ function _ like that; Tony needed to have everything spread out in a circle on the floor—before saying, “No.”

“You can’t just say no. You have to have evidence.” With grim pleasure, Tony noted the tissue box also balanced on the corner of Rhodey’s desk. He wondered for a second if he could take one, but ultimately decided that the smug look he would almost definitely get in return wasn’t worth it.

Of  _ course _ Rhodey had gotten him sick. It was obviously some kind of payback for how annoying Tony had been recently—and he would maintain this theory indefinitely unless Rhodey happened to provide a valid counterargument, thanks, no questions at this time.

(Because his voice sounded like shit and he didn’t trust himself to be able to physically answer said questions, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that this was absolutely, positively, Rhodey Rhodes’s fault).

Unless the payback had been the whipped cream in his pillow on Tuesday. 

He quickly dismissed that as an outlier and not relevant to the case.

Rhodey pretended to work on whatever it was he was working on for a few seconds—glancing up at Tony every so often—before he apparently accepted that Tony was not going anywhere (of course he wasn’t—even the thought of walking back out of the dorm building made him want to face-plant on the bed) and lowered his pen. “Okay, you want evidence? Maybe the fact that you’ve slept maybe six hours in the past week, and your immune system’s already shit to begin with, so clearly  _ you’re  _ the one who gave this to _ me _ .”

“Mleh.” Tony didn’t mean to make that noise. “Well,  _ you’re _ the one who…”

And that was when he waved his hand around vaguely as Rhodey watched with a raised eyebrow, because he  _ really  _ wasn’t thinking straight enough for this and his head felt like a stupid sack attached to his neck. When he coughed, there was an odd crinkling in his ear.

“What? Leaves my room?”

“Please. I’m never here.” Tony pointed. “See, you can tell ‘cause the bed’s made.”

Rhodey followed his finger. “That’s my bed.”

“Really?” Tony looked back and forth between the two beds. The two functioningly identical beds, so give him a break. “Huh. Told you I’m never up here.”

He paused as Rhodey tried and failed to hide a cough into his elbow, and then said, “You know, maybe you  _ should _ join the military if you actually make your bed—you’ve already got the, the, the—” he snapped his fingers, trying to come up with the word “—the aura. Of conformity. You’d fit right in.”

Rhodey very deliberately turned a page in one of his textbooks, but his eyes didn’t move. “I make my bed ‘cause otherwise the sheets get all bunched up at the end and there’s no room for my feet.”

“Stop being tall, then.”

Tony got a well-deserved exasperated look for that, because Rhodey was  _ maybe _ half an inch taller than him. And anyway, Tony still wasn’t done with his growth spurt. Which he definitely would have.

(That was the thing about being fifteen and rooming with a seventeen-year-old).

He waited for Rhodey to continue not answering him, walking over to the other desk—the one on what was presumably his side of the room, that looked like it hadn’t been used for anything other than whatever had made those weird stains—and tapping his fingers absently across the surface. Usually that would be soothing, but today it felt like hammers rapping into his brain, and he stopped. “So I feel like we got off track here.”

“No, we didn’t,” Rhodey said in a monotone.

“We were discussing the fact that—”

“No, we weren’t.”

“—that you got me sick—”

“Did not, but feel free to stop talking to me about it anyway.”

Tony put on his best frown, the one that Jarvis had stopped indulging about eight years ago, and crossed both his arms over the top of the unoccupied desk chair. “I thought you liked me.”

Rhodey shrugged. “I also like getting my projects done. Especially when they’re due tomorrow.”

Tony scooted forward, still draped against the back of the chair as its wheels made squeaky noises across the floor, and tried to peer over Rhodey’s shoulder. “You didn’t finish that? My class got it like a week ago.”

“Yeah, so did mine. I was  _ busy _ , shut up.” Rhodey twitched one of his papers out of Tony’s reach.

“How very irresponsible of you, Rhodey Rhodes. For shame.”

“When are you going to stop calling me that?”

“Never ever.”

“It sounds ridiculous.”

“How can you say that, that’s what you wrote for your name.” Tony pointed to the top of the nearest sheet of paper, where it did indeed say “Rhodey Rhodes” in a neat line at the heading.

Rhodey blinked at it. “Shit.” He rifled around for an eraser as Tony took the opportunity to snag one of the tissues out of the box.

He balled it up in his pocket once he was done and watched Rhodey’s listless attempts to fix his heading. It was obvious that his roommate was out of it—and he wasn’t just saying that because he could recognize the same symptoms in himself.

“So,” he finally said after a full minute of Rhodey staring blankly at the empty space at the top of his paper as though waiting for words to magically appear. “Not that I didn’t thoroughly enjoy that and am going to bring it up forever—”

“Please don’t.”

“—buuuut I think you need to sleep before you accidentally write the rest of your report in iambic pentameter or something.”

“I don’t know what you do when you’re sleep deprived, but that’s not the go-to for most people.” Rhodey glanced quickly up at the clock as though tempted, but then his gaze fell back down to his project. “I did mention how this is due tomorrow, right?” He looked like he was trying to remind himself more than Tony.

The wheels of Tony’s chair squeaked again as they swiveled around and around.

“Stop looking at me like that.” Rhodey coughed.

More squeaking.

“I said stop it, you’re sick too.”

Tony opened his mouth to argue, but he only ended up coughing as well. As soon as he could, he lifted his head high and spoke. “You have a distinctly smug look right now. Stop that.”

Rhodey shrugged. “I’m just saying, you need to rest as much as I do—do not even try to say what I know you’re gonna say—but unfortunately we have these things called—” He visibly struggled to keep his eyes open as he waved his hands vaguely at the project piled in front of him, his voice lowering into a mumble that Tony could barely hear. “—hmm.” There was a jumble of random syllables, in the midst of which Tony was pretty sure he caught the word “robotics,” but then it dwindled into a sigh and Rhodey’s head slid into his hands. “I’m tired.”

Tony agreed with all the (limited) breath in his body. “Yeah.”

“Maybe—” Rhodey started.

“I might—”

“We could—”

“If you—”

And Tony wasn’t sure of the exact mechanics of how it happened, but both of them ended up stretched out across Rhodey’s bed, and the feeling of the soft comforter against his cheek was pure bliss. The bed had been so nicely made, too—they were going to mess it up, but Tony couldn’t bring himself to care as his entire body seemed to give a sigh of relief, the dull cloudy aching finally given comfort.

He really should’ve come up here earlier. Now, in hindsight, he couldn’t fathom the decision of his previous self to go traipsing around campus looking for something to blow up as a distraction from the sheer  _ ick _ that had slowly grown more and more undeniable as the day wore on.

Well, he knew why. Going and going and going until he burned himself out had always been his modus operandi—that was how solutions got invented, how problems got solved, how he got toughened up—and it really hadn’t been until Rhodey had caught him one night literally passed out in the stairwell for him to ever question it. 

And now Rhodey was all of inches away from him, just a hand stretch away from touching.

They would’ve been touching already—these were  _ dorm room _ beds, after all—except that Tony was curled down near the bottom of the bed and Rhodey arched up by the pillows, an odd kind of yin and yang.

He was cold all of a sudden, even though his skin was warm when he touched it, and he twisted himself up in the blankets with a sniff.

“Scoot over.” Rhodey’s voice was muffled, coming from somewhere in the unknown space above Tony’s head. There was the sound of rustling, and something poked at his side. “I’m falling off here.”

“Mmph.” Tony refused to open his eyes. He was all wrapped around himself like a potato bug, and he did  _ not _ plan on moving anytime in the near future, thanks. See what Rhodey Rhodes made of that.

After another few unsuccessful pokes, Tony heard a sigh and the mattress shifted under the addition of more weight as Rhodey pressed into his side, his arm hesitating a bit before flopping over Tony’s back.

Tony smiled into the blanket and let himself sink into the warmth as they both fell asleep.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!


End file.
